


Nihil Interit

by SilverDagger



Category: Claymore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:17:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regret isn't easy to shake off, and Teresa's ghost follows them both.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nihil Interit

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Nihil Interit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9274985) by [archeoptah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/archeoptah/pseuds/archeoptah)



> Title is unabashedly stolen from my favorite comic – namely Neil Gaiman's Sandman – and comes from the latter half of the quotation _omnia mutantur, nihil interit_ , or _everything changes, nothing is truly lost_.

Ilena turns the blade aside with a flick of her wrist.

“You need discipline,” she says. “You've got the fire to succeed, but that doesn't give you the skill.”

She lashes out with the final word, and Clare evades, this time effortless. A warrior created with Teresa's flesh and blood, weak though she is – a failed experiment, the Organization would have it. Ilena isn't so certain. A failure shouldn't be able to read youki like that, or react so quickly, with such precision. But the girl is naïve still, too reckless, and that will kill her faster than weakness ever could.

Ilena attacks again, faster this time, only to find her upward strike met with steel as Clare advances, closing in with renewed ferocity, surprising speed. Ilena falls back a pace, drawing her opponent out – then steps aside and follows through with a rapid jab to Clare's defenseless side, and a kick to sweep her feet from under her. In a true battle, the next move would be her head, or a downward slash through collarbone and ribcage, cutting clean through lungs and heart. Instead, Ilena lets her fall, and waits for her to stand again.

“Concentrate,” she snaps. “Don't let me unbalance you.”

Clare pushes herself to her feet with blood streaming down her side, breathing hard, her teeth bared and sharper than they should be. She hisses something inaudible that might have been a curse, head bowed, her remaining hand clenched white around the hilt of her sword. _That could be trouble_ , Ilena thinks. There's an old shame there, the kind too likely to bleed into anger if not dealt with carefully, and there's anger enough in her already. That isn't surprising, precisely – Ilena remembers well enough what low-ranking warriors endure, in training and after, and she doubts that all that much has changed since she turned her own back on a soldier's life. Even so, such weakness is dangerous.

“Enough,” she says. “We need to rest. The both of us.”

“I'm fine,” Clare says.

“You're not.”

The girl holds her gaze for a moment more, long enough to let her know the challenge is deliberate – _bold, this one_ – before bowing her head in acquiescence. But she does acquiesce, and Ilena feels an unexpected surge of pride at both the challenge and the restraint. It's been too long since she had a student. She'd forgotten how much she'd missed it.

“That was better, today,” she says. “You're beginning to learn the way of it.”

Clare looks startled, and then looks away, something in her expression folding in on itself like a painted fan. “Don't – ”

Ilena shakes her head sharply, cutting her off. 

“I'm not,” she says. “I'm not charitable enough to lie to you. You did well.”

Clare says nothing to that, only touches the place at her side where blood is still drying, then considers her hand as if the wet sheen of red on her skin is a curiosity, or answer to a question never asked.

“Not well enough,” she says, and this time when she turns away, looking towards the lakeside, Ilena lets her go. There's no time for indulgence, but this isn't self-pity. It's merciless, and Ilena has no doubt she believes it. And if there's no other comfort to offer her, gods know the girl has earned a bit of solitude, a bit of peace.

Later that evening, after the day's training is over, Ilena chops firewood one-handed as the twilight falls. It's surprising how easy it is, after all these years – how easy most things are, given time and given practice. Surprising, too, how much the repetitive work calms her.

She's set Clare to gathering vegetables from the garden, wild onions, snap peas, winter squash and green kale. The days are growing colder, winter sniffing around the door like a hungry dog, old and gray and patient. Ilena doesn't care, but her garden does. She's learned to be careful, since she settled here. She only ever plants what will outlast the frost.

The girl works in silence, subdued after the match, even her aura flickering low as a banked fire. She's clumsy with only one arm, and her weaker arm at that. An uncertain engine for Teresa's vengeance, if truth be told – but then, looking back, Ilena can't even be certain that Teresa would have wanted vengeance at all. Not in the end. Maybe not ever.

Her thoughts keep turning back to the way Clare had fought, half precision and half desperation, all instinct. It's an interesting strategy. The stronger the opponent, the stronger the technique. She struggles against weaklings in a way Teresa never had, but even so, there is potential there. And more than that, the echo of something, or someone... 

Ilena pauses, sets the axe aside and stretches, shaking the kinks from her muscles and the leaves from her hair, pushes down a twinge of bitterness. It shouldn't hurt like that, seeing another with Teresa's borrowed strength. She can't deny that it does.

No matter. She breathes in, breathes out, focuses on the rise and fall of her chest and the gradual loosening of tension in her shoulders and her neck, and old sorrow is nothing compared to that. The sky is darkening in the distance, though the sun still lingers above the horizon, and the air hums with the small noises of birds and insects. Mosquitos have little taste for Claymore blood, but she can hear them anyway, whining just outside the circle of her sight, darting around the fringes. This lake is their home, as much as it's ever been hers, and she supposes she can't begrudge it. Doesn't every creature have a right to seek its own survival?

There's enough firewood for the night, she decides, and other matters to attend to.

Clare pauses in her work as Ilena approaches, tense, scanning the periphery. Ilena walks slowly, holds her posture relaxed, her eyes downcast. No threat. She stops a few paces away, and does not bother with niceties or platitudes.

“If what you told me earlier is true,” she says, “you and the one called Phantom slew an awakened being together. An old one.”

“Yes.”

“That shouldn't be possible, for the forty-seventh warrior.”

Clare looks up at her, guarded, like she's waiting for another blow just about to fall.

“What exactly are you trying to ask me?” she says, and this time she isn't even wary, just blank and waiting. Calm as the dead air in the heart of a cyclone, and isn't _that_ an interesting thing.

Ilena doesn't reply. She looks at the darkening sky, the distant line of mountains ringing her little valley, and thinks about what lies beyond them. She supposes to an outsider, this place must feel like safety. Untrue, of course. There is danger here too, in the tangle of roots and branches, beneath the shadows of leaves. Ilena carries it with her, as all their kind do – and of course there are enemies without as well as within, and she can't begin to say whether or not Clare understands the cost of underestimating either.

“Listen,” she says at last. “What you're holding onto, whatever drives you like this, you need to let it go. Or you need to master it, before it masters you.”

“You know what drives me,” Clare says, looking back. “You know _why_.” She's placid on the surface, still as a frozen river, but there's an animal snarl hidden beneath the calm in her voice, a golden glint in her eyes that's more than just light reflected, and Ilena shakes her head. Teresa's little protege might have grown, but she hasn't changed. She's still a ragged and starveling stray, in her own mind if never elsewhere, a lost, angry child, prone to wandering too close to the edge.

“Yes,” Ilena says. “I do know. My advice still stands.”

“Your _advice_ ,” the girl breathes, before falling quiet. Angry, yes, there's no question of it. But not without reason, and Ilena feels the weight of recrimination whenever Clare looks at her – unless she imagines it only.

 _And what_ , she wants to ask, _would you have had us do if Teresa of the Faint Smile had been allowed to awaken?_ But she feels the lie coiled around the truth of it, like choking ivy around oak, and says nothing. If it's absolution she wants, if it's justification, she won't find it here.

Teresa is dead. It hadn't been necessary. Whether or not she regrets it... that's harder to say.

“I've been pushing you harder than I would another student,” she says – the only apology she knows how to give, and perhaps the only kind a child of Teresa might want. “You realize that, right? There's simply no time to do otherwise. You have a task that needs doing, and I –”

 _I've lived for a long time_ , she thinks, _and I have my own debts to pay_.

“I understand,” Clare says.

She doesn't. Not yet. But Ilena knows she will. And there are other things she wants to say too – _It will be well_ , and _you'll do what you have to_. That last, at least, Ilena knows is true, but whether she has any right to say it now, to Teresa's child, there's no way of knowing. 

“After you leave here,” she says instead, “don't forget this.”

“Your advice?” Clare says again, this time smiling with a light, too-familiar irony, and Ilena shakes her head. She crosses the last ground between them and kneels beside Clare, digs her fingers into the dark soil of the garden and says, “don't forget this.”

 _Don't forget that we can have a place here_ , she means. _Don't forget there's more to us than death_.

Clare nods, and touches the earth briefly, with something halfway between reverence and an envy that Ilena herself knows all too well. It's funny, that – the memory of lighted village windows, somewhere in a stranger's past, the way things look from the outside in.

“Your home,” Clare says, and this time, Ilena thinks she does understand. “I won't forget.”

“Good,” she says, and then, on impulse, “she would have been proud of you, you know. Don't forget that either.” 

“You think?”

“There's no question.”

“I think,” Clare says quietly, “I think she would have forgiven you.”

Which is doubtful, perhaps, and irrelevant regardless. But Ilena gets the sense that it isn't really what she's trying to say at all, not the dead she's speaking for, and it's surprising in the end how much and how little forgiveness changes. The important choices were made long ago, and she's adrift in the rapids now, pulled by currents stronger than she is – but lighter, freer than she has been in a long while.

“Come on,” she says, and offers Clare a hand to help her up. “No time for wasting while there's still work to do.”

Clare pushes herself to her feet instead, and smiles again like Teresa used to – gentle on the surface and ice beneath – and that does hurt, for a moment, before Ilena breathes out and lets it go. She's right about the time, and the work, and she's right about the way things need to end, and this was never about second chances. Not for her. But Teresa's child is young still, in her pride and her obstinacy, and there's a fitting symmetry in the sight of her so quick to stand on her own. 

_A warrior's spirit_ , Ilena thinks. She'd had that as a child too. It's served her well, and with luck it always will.

Sunset lights the sky, glorious red and golden, and throws their shadows ahead of them.


End file.
